16 Nov2018

Where has Technitribe been for the last 2 years? The short answer: in domain limbo.

Christmas Islands

.cx is a Christmas Islands top-level domain (TLD). I did not have the domain set to auto-renew because I was trying to get away from my old registrar. At the time it was expiring I didn’t have the cash on hand to renew it. I will admit, I did not read all the Term & Conditions for the .cx TLD before registering. I guess I really screwed the pooch there.

It turns out that if you have a .cxdomain, and it expires, then you have a problem. They will effectively hold it hostage for a period of 4 months. During this time you have the “option” to restore the domain, but at the cost of $400.00 USD. Like I said, I was not very cash flush at the time.

Waiting Period

Shortly after the domain expired I moved across the country. While getting set up in my new location the domain left the restoration period and was open to general registration again. As is typical, a reseller had squatted the lnx.cx domain and bought it as soon as it became available. I resigned myself to my fate, I would have to let it go for a while.

Return of lnx.cx

The blog is now back! A few weeks ago I finally had the cash necessary to register it from a new registrar who isn’t evil (Netim). We have a new SSL Certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt, no more untrusted RapidSSL security alerts in your browser. And, as an aside, the setup for installing this new certificate was incredibly easy. I am genuinely surprised at how smooth it was using the certbot tool.

What’s Next?

I need to start writing more blog posts! I might shift the focus of the blog from being so Tech focused and open it up to capture some of my other interests, too. Such as woodworking. I really enjoy making and restoring furniture. I should write some blog posts about that.

I have tried this out and it’s great! Like most everything else on GitHub it’s very intuitive and simple to use. I won’t steal their thunder and describe it all here. So go check out the blog post for yourself and read up on the details (screenshots included!).

Continue reading if you’re still interested in incorporating this kind of filtering and labeling into your Gmail account.

The Problem

I’ve been looking for a way to filter my GitHub Pull Request lists under the condition that a review is requested of me. The online docs didn’t show any filter options for this, so I checked out the @GitHubHelp twitter account. The answer was there on the front page — they don’t support filtering PRs by review-requested-by:me yet:

@zaghnaboot Adding a filter for reviewers is definitely on our radar, though I don’t have a specific timeline to share. –SJ

19 Jan2017

Have you ever had a sub-select where you really needed to reference a value in the outer query? I know I have! The naive way would be to run the outer query and then loop over the results running the inner query on each one. Luckily, there’s a better way. The Correlated subquery. Check it out! The example given is

SELECT employee_number, name
FROM employees AS Bob
WHERE salary > (
SELECT AVG(salary)
FROM employees
WHERE department = Bob.department);

Updates

This new function accepts inputs using non-standard prefix units such as single-letter, or mis-capitalized units. For example, parse_string will not accept a short unit like ‘100k‘, whereas parse_string_unsafe will gladly accept it:

3 Jul2016

bitmath is a Python module I wrote for working with file size units (ex: 12GiB, 64kB) as objects. You can use them just like you would use regular numbers in python. It’s full of other functionality as well. Objects have native ‘convert to $unit‘ methods, support native arithmetic, are sortable, and include a ‘best human readable prefix’ method.

Since March 2014, bitmath had only been available via PyPi and Fedora/EPEL repositories. Now, as of July 2nd 2016, bitmath is natively available to Ubuntu users by means of a new Personal Package Archive (PPA) hosting bitmath builds for Xenial, Wily, Vivid, Trusty, and Precise.

Virtual Disk Guide

Interested in virtualization? Do QCOWs rule your filesystem? Are you a libvirt or KVM+QEMU wizard? I wrote a book about virtual disk management. Check out the The Linux Sysadmin's Guide to Virtual Disks online for free at ScribesGuides.com.

Consider supporting the author by purchasing a hard copy of the first edition for just $10.00 on Lulu.com.

bitmath

bitmath is a Python library for dealing with file size units (GiB's, kB's, etc) in a sane way. bitmath supports arithmetic, rich comparison, conversion, automatic best human-readable representation, and many otherutility functions. Read some examples on the docs site or check out the source on GitHub.